Wave

by Sonali Deraniyagala

I’d never heard shrieking like this before. So wild, wretched, it frightened me, rattled the wall I was holding on to. This noise was crackling into the numbness in my head. It was blasting the smallest stir of hope in my heart.

Strong images

I’ll wait until all the bodies are found, I told myself. Then I will kill myself.

Broken and bewildered, my brother had the house cleared and packed away, painted and polished, all in the first month or two after the wave. For him, that was the practical thing to do, to impose order on the unfathomable, perhaps. I had been collapsed on a bed in my aunt’s house at the time and could not contemplate returning to my parents’ house. I quaked at the very thought of it.

Good comparison between two grief spirals

A child’s red underpants. My eyes rushed past this. I didn’t want to find anything that was ours.

Strong grief trigger, stronger image.

These waves, this close. I stood there taunting the sea, our killer. Come on then. Why don’t you rise now? Higher, higher. Swallow me up.

Another strong grief reaction

Now, in this house, I can bring my parents close. For six years I’ve pushed them and their death to the fringes of my heart. That’s all I could tolerate, my focus was on our boys and Steve. How hideous, that there should be a pecking order in my grief.

Seven years on, and their absence has expanded. Just as our life would have in this time, it has swelled. So this is a new sadness, I think. For I want them as they would be now. I want to be in our life. Seven years on, it is distilled, my loss. For I am not whirling anymore, I am no longer cradled by shock.